1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for the management of Workcell Systems capable to control concurrent processes that use pieces of equipment, here called Resources, interacting with each other according to the needs and the changes that have not been forecast in advance in their process cycles, by means of a continuous real-time re-scheduling of automatic tasks. Further it relates to an Automation Management System.
2. Description of the Related Art
Robotic systems are often used to increase productivity, reduce production costs, eliminate human errors, remove human Operators from a dangerous environment or simply to take over boring and frustrating tasks.
This is the case of the automation of industrial production processes where the use of electromechanical devices has been exploited for the execution of repetitive and, sometimes, complex tasks. The automation concept has been limited to cycles that might be interrupted waiting for the coincidence with other tasks but never with a continuous re-scheduling of tasks depending on circumstances that are not, and cannot be, forecast in advance.
Moreover, the automation concept has been limited, so far, to production processes where pieces of equipment are dedicated to specific tasks, notwithstanding if they were saturated or not, and without any attempt to use them to perform concurrent processes, or to take any automatic decision, based on expert-system rules, to re-do some process steps or to schedule new process tasks according to rules applied to the results achieved by the System and/or to unexpected Operator requests.
Thus, prior art automation concepts cannot be applied to environments where the tasks can be changed very often as, for example, the ones of Laboratory Medicine and Research Laboratories, that are distinguished by: unpredictable environment, use of general purpose instruments that may be used for different assays, small scale automation, need of flexible automation, need to saturate complex and expensive equipment that are generally used for different protocols that need to be run almost contemporaneously, need to give the automated system the possibility to automatically modify the sample protocols upon User request and/or expert-system rules based on the results of the assay process.
It is an object of the present invention to overcome the above said limit and to make possible the contemporaneous execution of concurrent processes that make use of common pieces of equipment in order to obtain their better saturation and to give the possibility to automate processes with dynamic data entry and/or continuous request reception.
According to the present invention, these and other objects are attained by means of a method for the management of Workcell Systems, using an Automation Management System to control a plurality of Resources, designated to handle Samples along said Workcell Systems to perform operations on said Samples, comprises the following steps: associating a Sample Protocol to each Sample, associating to each Resource a Resource Driver, capable to drive said Resource, each of said Resource Driver is controlled by a Process Controller and communicates with the other Resource Drivers by means of variables associated to each Resource, which define and modify the status of said Resources, executing said Sample Protocols by said Process Controller in a concurrent way, guaranteeing multi-threading, bottleneck avoidance, dynamic assignment of Resources in mutual exclusion, sample priority handling, Resource load balancing and automatic error recovery, automatically modifying said Sample Protocols by continuously re-scheduling automatic tasks on different Resources, according to the results of the execution of said Sample Protocols and the status of said variables, expressing the status of said Resources, and thus having an intelligent and reactive control of the workflow, automatically and dynamically taking the appropriate decisions.
Whereas a Sample is a specimen of material in a form that allows treatment or assay on the appropriate Resources, and a Sample Protocol is a collection of data indicating the tasks that have to be executed on the associated Sample in said Workcell System.
For such reasons the invention has been dedicated to the automation of Laboratory Protocols but can be applied to industrial automation, at the moment the complexity of industrial processes reaches the same complexity level as Laboratory environments.